


Sleepyhead

by Phrenotobe, stagprince



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Illustrated, Non-Consensual Kissing, blood mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-20 12:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1510055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phrenotobe/pseuds/Phrenotobe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stagprince/pseuds/stagprince
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the sour don’t-care-about-taste dregs of moonshine in a trollware mug, and Rose’s mouth feels old, the rest of her far-off and slightly furred. She puts her fingertips on the table, feeling the grain through numb fingertips that she places down with concentrated care. Her head goes forward, though she didn’t really intend to, to get a better look. </p>
<p>She wakes up on packed mulch dirt and a sunset sky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleepyhead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rememberwhenyoutried](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rememberwhenyoutried/gifts).



> Many thanks to my [brother](http://strideer.tumblr.com), who stayed up to an abominable hour to draw me these illustrations.

It’s the sour don’t-care-about-taste dregs of moonshine in a trollware mug, and Rose’s mouth feels old, the rest of her far-off and slightly furred. She puts her fingertips on the table, feeling the grain through numb fingertips that she places down with concentrated care. Her head goes forward, though she didn’t really intend to, to get a better look.  
The arch of an open book spine sits on her eyeline, and she rolls her head sideways, curling up her fingers and making a fist. Her clothes are too bright. Too yellow. Her eyes slowly close. The table beneath her fingertips is wonderfully steady, and not too cold.

She wakes up on packed mulch dirt and a sunset sky.  
There is a sharp-looking stone dangerously close to her head, and a thick root is bucking up through the purple rock, gnarled and old yet with a too-clean artificiality. In the near distance, two off-angled stakes are hammered into the ground, a rope bridge leading to the mainland. Though Rose has never been here, she has heard tales. She also knows, though her vision is not twenty-twenty, that the blue shape standing with arms and legs purposefully akimbo is Vriska Serket.  
Her first instinct is to draw her needles; her second, to play dead.

A purple compass looms in the sky above the verdant vegetation, casting a light shadow. It’s certainly a novel kind of land, the type described in books of coy poetry.  
“Hey,” the troll yells, “Hey!”  
Rose gets to her feet and brushes off her clothes.  
Serviceable black and grey, bright red shoes with popper snaps and a libra symbol, teal but hedging on green in the yellow light.  
“Hey,” she replies in return. Rose can see the lion eyes behind those big eighties-style rims, and is mostly aware that the segment of time she is inhabiting is younger than she is now. It’s only a few months, but a lot can happen in that time.  
“What are you waiting for?” The troll calls, “Come on! We have puzzles to solve.”  
Rose follows along, more out of curiosity than anything else. There are rope vines that hang over terrifyingly long drops, tests that require daring reaches of faith and all the luck in the world. Rose can _See_ the best way down to the mulching forest floor, treading with caution from fallen tree to the slippery moss, a tug in a notch to open the path and descend, carefully, right down the cobweb stairs. Vriska leaps for a vine, swinging out with glorious abandon and catching herself heavily with an arm on a stumpy branch. She has a bruise on her forearm in blue-black glory from a mis-timed leap, but the more Vriska pushes her luck, the more the land rewards her.  
Rose is very aware that this is not Her Place.

They fit together a plate, filled with runes in a language Rose has only started knowing - if there’s a logic to the pattern, she doesn’t know it yet. With two luck players, the shards show up almost as if they want to be found, under rocks and scrubby light-starved bushes. The artificiality of the land shows itself in odd moments, fully-formed stalagmites rising through the floors that overturn on an organic hinge to reveal a chunk of stone beneath.  
“Nice work,” Vriska says. It’s patronizing, but with the warmth that should be going to a completely different person. This entire world is a substitution, but it’s nicer than the grey monochrome reality waiting behind them both.

When Rose begins to tire, Vriska starts to get snappier, the edges of who the interloper is starting to bleed through into whatever consciousness a dream ghost has. She stuffs a hand into her pocket, rattling her dice through the cloth of her jeans. The gold of her eye stutters, but holds. Like Rose, Vriska likes to hold an illusion and live intensely through it.

“I’m sorry,” Rose says, before she snaps back to the tired, rot-stained walls of the central computer room. Kanaya’s soft hand places at her temple, the cool thumb brushing back her fringe to check her temperature.  
“‘M’sor’,” Rose repeats again, her tongue thick in her mouth. “Hey Kaninny.”  
Nausea threatens when she rolls her head toward the bessed cold of Kanaya’s palm. It’s wonderful to keep things so dark, if only her girlfriend could be so dim.  
“Ugh,” Rose manages with eyes scrunched shut, a gutteral moan into the tabletop.

 

Days are hard to mark in perpetual twilight, but in absence of other systems, Rose starts marking lines in the back of the book. It’s not completely straight all the time, her motor control is frequently not so hot - and sometimes she draws two, just to make sure - but it just about counts. A cross bar marks the fifth, or occasionally the seventh, and Rose stays awake in a kind of hazy limbo, hopped up on sour, thick caffeine and sickly alcohol that tastes more and more like fruit gushers every time she alchemizes more of it. “Chmickals,” she tries to explain, drawing odd and half-remembered shapes in the book to Dave, who just pulls a face. It’s frustrating to try and explain on a hangover, her hands shake when she’s hung under, and between the two substances it’s fair to assume the only reason her heart isn’t buzzing like a hummingbird mainlining speed is that her god tier halts her untimely death.  
“I’m worried about you,” he says, before he turns away, “That shit is a mess.”  
Rose knows this. She reaches for another drink to steady her nerves.

It’s an accident that brings her back to Vriska again. Two cups on the desk - both hers now, she’s drank Kanaya’s coffee share and followed it with home brewing, the alcohol going straight to her head. She rests her head comfortably on the open page, the yellowed paper soft and slightly warm against her cheek.  
Her eyes close once, twice, before she’s gone again.

“Hey nerd,” Vriska says, far too close.  
Rose awakens with a start on a small clot of land on the lower east side, her limbs slack with weariness. Vriska has changed, white dress and blue logo and a smile that edges on slightly fanatical. Rose slips from zero, a wary awareness, straight into the bright and glaring full ten fear of a hindbrain that understands very well the dangers of poison and predator teeth.  
It’s only baffling for a few seconds that she finds herself wearing green.

Vriska is stronger than she looks - or stronger than a human girl would be in her place. Rose isn’t any kind of shape to be raised over anybody’s head but in a troll’s grasp she’s always mostly at a loss. Kanaya touches her gently for the most part, but Vriska’s fingers are grinding into the curve of her collarbone as she’s lifted off the floor. Rose turns her head away, braces her arms against the strength clutching her tight.  
“No,” she says clearly, taking in a breath and holding it without knowing.  
The kiss is as clumsy as any cheap teen thrill; a forceful mash of lips enough to feel the outline of each other’s teeth through oily lipstick, a pair of pinpricks that drag raw at Rose’s soft mouth as Vriska draws back.  
“Don’t,” she says with a pained hiss, tasting iron tang with the aching scratch exposed to air, “I don’t want to.”  
Vriska’s brow puckers, that same moment of disturbed static as her eyes flicker from yellow to blank and back again.  
“And I’m not Tavros,” Rose clarifies, her grasp tight around Vriska’s wrists.  
Vriska’s eyes clear, white and dead.  


“Fucking-” she starts, giving Rose an angry shake, rattling her skull. Rose lands on the ground, rejected.  
“I’m afraid you started it,” Rose says, though she knows it won’t help.  
Vriska kicks an angry clod of dirt in her direction, letting out an outraged yell to the skies. Rose gets to her feet, aware that she roughly knows the area. The socks and sandals are not really correct jogging attire, but she’ll make do.  
She stares for a minute, waiting for another movement from the troll. An imperceptible shift forward before she starts up with her eightfold _lungs_ of all things, if that is what aids her in being so fantastically loud. Rose darts sharply left, running as fast as her legs can take her. It’s a dream bubble, so by the rules of logic, she cannot get tired. She keeps telling herself this as she comes to the cliff face, peppered with climbing apparatus disguised as grass tufts and handy-dandy outcrops of purple rock, the rope ladder sawn off into unravelled pieces. She grabs for purchase above her head with speed rather than grace, and keeps going.  
“You’d better run!” Vriska yells behind her.  
If Rose is lucky, she’ll fight on the top of the cliff, and not be cut down on the rocks.

She pulls herself over the edge with a frantic tug and scrambles sideways onto the flat top, rolls onto her back to rest for a moment. There’s a weary crunch of a feeling as she folds in half to get to her feet, staggering for a moment as she gets her balance and bearings.  
She tugs her thorns from her waistband without thought - assuming that they’re there makes it so. She spots the blue shimmer of Vriska’s wing-tips over the edge, flapping once or twice a minute like they’re reminding their owner that they exist, but not being particularly involved in her method of locomotion.  
There’s a sword in her left hand, hooked like a horn at the tip. Rose’s feet slide into a wide stance, grounded and bent for a low profile with her thorns point-down.  
“Ready?” Vriska yells, landing hard on both feet.  
She swings in as she steps forward, not really aiming. Rose raises a thorn automatically toward the swing and hears the harsh crack of trollish lacquer against wood and steel composite.  
Luck is incredible.

“Born ready,” Rose says as a polite cliche. She shoves with her blocking hand, slips the other forward, point-first. The tip catches on Vriska’s inner forearm, a vivid cerulean scratch against the grey of her skin. Vriska reaches out to shove, her other arm rising for another downstrike, and Rose tips out of the way, following the arc of her arm and sidestepping to force her own weapon down on the extension of Vriska’s arm. Another long scratch, freely dripping. Vriska pulls her elbow back for a sharp, sudden hit in the gut. Rose staggers, winded, dropping a thorn and putting a hand to her solar plexus. A flash of gold thread and purple velvet gives way to the early-game childishness of a short skirt and well-worn sneakers. She does not fit in here, but wearing somebody else’s semblance will do nothing to help.

Rose tucks in and rolls, grasping for her other thorn, down on one knee to block another hit of Vriska’s sword. Dice rattle dully on the plum-colored earth in Rose’s peripheral vision, and a jack-in-the-box springs into view, swinging drunkenly at Rose’s face. The carved wooden tip of a blue-painted illusion made solid weaves, the crescent edge smashes into Rose’s forearm for a unique explosion of focused pain, and the white-hot scratch of Vriska’s weapon as it slithers off a thorn draws a coy line into Rose’s face.

“Try harder!” she crows, lifting her sword for another strike. Rose scrambles to her feet again, the new feel of wool under her fingertips, coiled around the thorns in her hands. She pulls it tight across the needles, feels the resistant tug. Wetness rolls down her cheek. The sword dips again, slipping away with Rose’s parry and coming back for a second slash, strong and speedy. The rattle of dice sounds as they bounce in eerie reverse across the ground and back into Vriska’s hand.  
The sword edge cuts across, gouging into the outer wood of her thorns and tearing through the threads wrapped around them, Rose’s breath swift and throat tight at the hit. The wool is still lingering, hanging free where it has been cut, a tight-wound fibre waiting to ensnare and tangle and catch held close to the needle tips. This place is not hers.  
Rose goes on the offensive, a pinprick to the belly, a scrape across a grey collarbone just below the jugular, exposing something like armor plate beneath the skin, yellowy at the scrape and covered over blue and welting. Her thorn thumps wetly into the joint and cracks something in Vriska’s shoulder, and her arm sags loose and boneless, scattering the eight die across the ground.

The dice summon as sixty dots point upward. There comes a monster with a large and thudding stride caught in mid motion before the foot comes down, tiny eyes and large tusks, marshmallow-man wide with a permanently etched expression of distaste. Rose knows how to deal with those.  
A thorn to the shin, a brave jump to the forward knee and grasping for the outreaching arm. The attack pattern never changes, and she works her way right-way up onto the bicep. Tug the wool to bring it down.  
The ogre begins to waver and topple, right on cue, and she raises both needles to drive into their eyes. The arm she’s standing on begins to fluctuate, buzzing out of existence like a glitch, and she lands heavily on her back, winded. Surprised, she licks her lips, tasting blood on her mouth, tiny scratches and cuts all over beginning to sting. Vriska’s dice are back in her hand, the ogre evaporated into blue light and nothing.

“Bad luck,” Vriska says, not precisely to her but to the role. She reaches to grasp Rose’s shirt, her hand cruel and hard as she drags Rose backwards to teeter on the edge of the cliff, scuffing her shoes in the leaf-dirt to try and gain purchase. Her thorns feel strange in her hands, more like a dagger than anything.  
“Hope you can fly!” Vriska chirps, and tips her with a shove. Rose feels weightless, arms bracing out for impact, uncertain where the ground is. The fall won’t kill her, she’s pretty sure. She _can_ fly, though it’s a little late to clap her hands and protest that she believes.

Rose lands with a crash on the steel-composite floor of the meteor, a pain in the back of her head from the hit and the front of her head from dehydration and ill-advised alcoholism. She allows herself a little groan that comes out a lot more deep, a lot more present than she expected. Her feet are resting neatly on the bench, the rest of her folded up like an over-ambitious paper plane that somebody gave up on half way.  
“Fuck,” she articulates loquaciously, as Vriska lands with a crash on the tabletop. She comes forward with all the swagger of a cowboy king, hopping off to touch down. Rose scrambles to her feet, patting herself down for her weaponry. She draws the end of a thorn, and keeps pulling, the end growing wide and then tapering longer and ever longer to a point.  
It's a lance, black with white touches, reassuring in the heft. It swings out easily, firm but nigh on weightless when tipped, and Vriska gives her a low whistle.  
“Are you brave enough?” she says, her tone sly.  
Rose startles, lifts up the lance and holds it in the crook of her arm. Her feet take her forward, shoulders down and head lowered, a hand underneath to brace half-way down from the tip.  
Vriska pulls her mouth into a smirk, catching Rose before impact by the shoulder with her arm fully extended, shoving her back to a stop. Her hand lands with a slap on the middle of the shaft, gripping it, pulling it roughly out of Rose’s hand.  
“Guess not,” Vriska says, flipping it around so the point rests just right of Rose’s heart.

Rose jerks awake, shivering and shaky-handed. Terezi is staring at her for a given measure of the word, a crease in her brow before she stands up and pointedly walks off.  
“Teetee,” Rose mangles, “ _Terzi..._ ”  
Her head rests back against the table.

Six weeks or so later It’s another syrupy morning. Or evening - Everybody has attempted to rest once in the past twenty-four hours. Karkat eyes Rose with all the surly respect he gives things he doesn’t understand and doesn’t intend to. His mouth puckers up around his mess of an underbite and he reaches out to grab for her shoulder as she tips back toward the floor. She slumps messily against the pidgeon-puff of his mineral thorax.  
“You’re so _helpful_ ,” she croaks. She gives him a smile that is utterly sloppy around the edges and forced enough to look clownish and fake.  
“You’re drunk,” he rumbles, “You have finally done it. You woke up drunk and it is a raging success. You haven’t slept off anything and your life continues to disappoint all of us, but especially me.”  
Rose’s hand rises to pat his cheek, lingering on the edge of overstaying welcome and then just staying there, her eyes half-closed. Karkat’s cheeks start to cover over with an angry flushed haze. He shoves forward and Rose folds onto the table, reaching automatically for a pencil to mark a line.  
“Not here, you blistering bag of fuck,” he says, wresting it from her hands.  
She droops bonelessly to the wooden surface, spreading her fingers to put her palms flat.

The same old sky, purple compasses and golden-orange horizon in perpetual demi-twilight stretch above, filtered grainy and scratched through hastily fitted components. Rose feels more different than she ever has, awake in bubbles but feeling drunk and heady as she ever does.  
“Why are you fucking haunting me?” Vriska yells. It’s a good question.  
Rose opens her mouth to answer, her lips parting with a manufactured grind. Sunset light shines through the curled steel ringlets of her hair and the constant static note of an onboard fan sounds loud and immediate and resonant, inescapably close by. The dinky notes of twin music boxes play their tune, ticking off time second by dragging second.

“I don't know,” she whispers, in a voice that isn’t hers.  
Her fingers are formed to an angled point in liu of proper fingertips, sensor pads corrugated under the curve in a mock-fingerprint. Is this what it is like to be a living part of time?  
Rose puts her hand to her mouth, feeling over the glossy blue synthetic bubble-pop of her lips, the sudden sharpness of the teeth behind and lurking. The movement kicks the memory out of sync, Tavros-the-memory a vanished bauble gone from Vriska’s side, racing-stripe red hoverchair and all.  
Vriska is different again - her figure in bubbles never really matches up from episode to episode - but Rose’s shape seems to have caught her on the back foot. She draws her dice like she’s ready to fight. Psionic power is at Rose’s beck and call if she wants it - an interrupt, illogic in the circuits and circulatory system, near the code cluster of nothing but amphibian calls and digital game shenanifuckery.

Rose lands delicately on both feet with a click of the heels. By the bridge that Vriska stands, consistent summer heat and constant movement have made the ground dusty, heavy purple dirt ceeding to the rock beneath. Sword in hand, she flicks the tip down with an audible swish, rolling her wrist to raise the point.

Rose advances. Vriska rolls dice, but it’s a dud, a low roll that pulls nothing more than a couple of imps easily caught and thrown with these new, sharp hands.  
“Why do we keep meeting like this?” Rose says, and starts to laugh.  
Vriska’s dice bump back into her hands. Angrily, she flings them again, bouncing with a resonant _bong_ off Rose’s chest and falling to the floor.  
Vriska’s sword points too, to scrape over the metal, ineffectual on the steel composite.  
“Stop screwing with me,” she hisses.  
Rose catches the sword-tip, bending it until it creaks and snaps.  


“Give me a break,” she says, and drops it with a quiet rattle in the dust.  
Vriska backs up, raising the sword again, quick, jagged end sharp as the blade.  
“You’ll regret it,” she says.  
Rose lifts her arms in a ready state. Psionic power buzzes through the hollow points of her fingerclaws.  
“Do what you want,” she says, “But don’t you dare touch me.” 


End file.
